Archive for media

Los Angeles may be the most mediated city in the world: it is the backdrop of countless media representations. No wonder we have a hard time grasping it: which part is real and which part is fake? Is it a fool’s errand to try to separate the two?

We’ll discuss this and much more on Sunday, August 7 at 4pm at the WUHO Gallery in Hollywood, which is exhibiting an experimental moving image installation called Median. Created by Bill Ferehawkand David Hartwell, Median presents a Los Angeles of drive-by impressions. It distills the city into the canned personas that it projects to its passers-by and lends perspective on the everyday urban tics through which the city is read.

With Median as the backdrop, I’ll moderate a panel discussion with some keen observers of Los Angeles’s urban experience, including:

Bill Ferehawk and David Hartwell, creators of Median

Naomi Iwasaki, Program Director of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Great Streets Program

I was honored to give the Industry Keynote at Hot Docs, a giant documentary film festival in Toronto. I don’t know what they put in that water (which was delicious, by the way) but Torontonians love, love LOVE documentaries. They have a 700 seat theater that, year round, shows docs only, and I was completely charmed by its tagline: ESCAPE TO REALITY.

Of all conventional TV and film genres, you could easily argue that documentary is the one that is most self-conscious about its artful manipulation of reality. Since much of my research focuses on the impact of entertainment and media on individuals, communities and society at large, documentaries have proven an especially exciting object of study. (I have a TEDx talk about some of this research.)

In order to prep myself for the fest – which included a whopping 197 documentaries – I thought I’d revisit some survey research that we conducted at the Lear Center on the relationship between political beliefs and entertainment preferences. We discovered in those studies that predictable patterns emerged suggesting that even our escapes from reality – to ballets, tractor pulls, and blockbuster films – were tethered quite tightly to our deeply held beliefs about the world and how it ought to be.

For a nerd like me, this is absolutely fascinating stuff.

Our archive of data – from two large American representative sample surveys, and from a smaller version we conducted in Tunisia after the Arab Spring – includes detailed demographic, ideological and taste information about documentary film fans. Hot Docs gave me an excellent excuse to mine that data. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently gave my fifth talk for the TED network – this time on one of my favorite projects at the Norman Lear Center, where I’m the director of research. The Lear Center has conducted many studies demonstrating that entertainment plays a key role in people’s lives, igniting curiosity, inciting conversations, and importantly, influencing attitudes and behavior. One of my favorites was a series of U.S. national surveys that explored whether there is a correlation between entertainment preferences, what we enjoy, and political ideology, what we believe.

One thing you learn in survey research is that it’s not very helpful to ask people to label themselves politically. So we created an instrument that would diagnose the respondent’s ideology based on their responses to dozens of statements about hot-button political issues. Using statistical clustering analysis, we discovered that three groups emerged from our national sample. “Conservatives,” as we decided to call them, “liberals” and “moderates.” These same respondents were asked about their preferred leisure-time activities and their favorite radio and TV shows, Web sites, movies, games and sports and much more.

What we found is that each of these clusters had distinctly different entertainment and leisure preferences. (For a full run-down, check out our white paper.)

Now this kind of research doesn’t allow us to determine causation: I can’t tell you whether your politics determine taste or taste determines politics. But, if I had the chance to ask you enough questions, I would be able to predict your politics based on your taste. And vice versa.

I’ve always wanted to scale up this research to a global sample, where we could see what kinds of clusters emerge on a trans-national scale. Because as you know, in a networked world, culture, media, and politics are not constrained by national boundaries. So, last Fall, I leapt at the opportunity to administer a similar survey in Tunisia, the cradle of the Arab Spring.

Working with Mobile Accord, the company that created the SMS platform for the Haiti relief effort, we administered our survey to over 2,300 Tunisians on their mobile phones. We knew that our sample would skew younger and more Internet-savvy than the general population, which would provide us with a valuable glimpse into the mindset and media habits of a population that will most likely play a leading role in shaping the future of Tunisia, and perhaps the Middle East.

Because it was a mobile phone poll, we had to make the survey much shorter. So, in order to diagnose a respondent’s ideology we decided to focus on cultural politics. We asked questions about how their religious beliefs inform their entertainment choices, and the role that they believe government should play in that negotiation.

We also included specific questions about the controversial TV airing of Persepolis, an animated film which included an image of God, and the violent protests surrounding the anti-Islamic film, Innocence of the Muslims.

We identified three groups that fell on a spectrum from conservative to moderate to liberal. The group that most fascinated us was the largest group: conservatives. Among these young wired culturally conservative Tunisians, we found entertainment and media preferences that we would expect from liberals in the U.S.

“Surfing the Internet” was their favorite way of entertaining themselves (conservatives in the U.S. had chosen “reading” as their favorite.)

They were more into video games than reading.

When they do read books, they prefer romance novels and sci fi to religious texts.

We were amazed to discover that they were the most passionate consumers of American entertainment,

They demonstrated a strong preference for Hollywood films and they had less interest in local Tunisian fare than Moderates or Liberals.

They were also the most likely to say that U.S. entertainment has had a positive influence on the world.

So much for stereotypes about religious conservatism and anti-Americanism in the Middle East. The picture is far more complicated than you might think. The key is asking the right combination of questions on the right platform.

We know that politics are important but we tend to be dismissive about taste and the pleasures we take from TV so bad that it’s actually good. All too often we assume that entertainment is too trivial for serious critical inquiry. But I believe that entertainment preferences often go unrecognized as powerful indicators of personal and social aspirations. And, since the Cold War, we have found over and over again that popular culture can bridge deep national and political divides in the most surprising ways. In fact, many have argued that Hollywood films and TV shows have more impact on global public opinion than our foreign policy.

We can get so caught up in looking at people through the lens of demographics and ideology that it often obscures our view of what people really care about, what gives them pleasure. And when you know that, I believe you know the most important thing you can know about anyone.

Yesterday, I was very excited to launch the Media Impact Project, which aspires to be a global hub for the best research on measuring the impact of media. Supported by $3.25 million in initial funding from the Gates and Knight Foundations, I’m optimistic that the Norman Lear Center can help make media more accountable to audiences and contribute to a better understanding of the role that media plays in people’s lives.

The New York Times picked up the story and I was thrilled to see reporter Michael Cieply focus on this aspect of the program:

Monday is sort of a ramp-up day at TED, but this year the highlight for me was Inside TED, a glimpse into the machinations of a unique organization that’s trying to figure out how to spread ideas that are stalled or stuck in some way – perhaps they’re trapped in impenetrable jargon; maybe they’re stuck in a disciplinary silo . . . or a Nairobi slum. Regardless of the impediments, or perhaps due to them, TED aspires to create a media platform for awesome and sexy ideas to propagate.

Despite this expansive mission – based primarily on the notion that exposure and transparency are tools for solving the world’s problems – I think most TEDsters feel like there’s a tantalizing shroud of secrecy and sanctity enveloping the TED organization: exactly how many people work there? And how much money do they make from these hyper-expensive conferences (7,500 bucks a pop)? Who decides which videos are posted and featured?

Well, Inside TED was Chris Anderson’s way of opening up the ledgers and introducing the TED community to the brave (and wacky) souls who make this crazy ship run.

Some highlights:

Revenues? About $45 million last year, with $27 million coming from TED, TED Global, and TED Active. Anderson estimates that there are about 500 core attendees who have spent around $30,000 supporting TED over the years.

There are 1,400 talks on TED.com, with more than 50 million views per month. Only 200 are from TEDx events (and, so for, there have been 5,000 TEDx events with 8-10 more taking place per day.)

25% of their traffic is mobile, and they also distribute their talks through radio and TV channels (they’ve even put TED talks in taxis in Mumbai). Anderson suggested that TED speakers simply multiply their TED.com views by two in order to figure out about how many times their videos have been seen (that puts my two TED.com talks at 2.2 million views. Yowza.)

Their brilliant open translation project involves 11,000 translators and 35,000 translations in 97 languages. (I was thrilled to hear that the Gates Foundation was a key funder for this. Go Bill!)

When someone asked Anderson about his favorite failure (and he had earlier admitted that the Bono TED Prize challenge to wire Ethiopia was a dire misfire) he ended up talking about their struggle to balance accessibility with substance. In order to get those great, inspiring ideas “unstuck” it’s essential to find a way to translate them to a larger diverse audience. The accusations, from several quarters, that TED “dumbs down” complex ideas were obviously deeply troubling to Anderson. His assertion that substance must always trump style is a challenging standard to be held to, especially for a slick global media platform like TED. And, honestly, to the rest of us bloggers and professors and public intellectuals who must find that precarious balance between accuracy and rigor and the ethical imperative to share important ideas with people who never thought they’d be interested.

Ironically, these pencils were a big hit at the Tribeca Film Institute's super-high-tech Interactive fest.

Film festivals are tricky events to navigate. Of course they’re about art and commerce and, for some reason, all too many filmmakers are uncomfortable with that combination. Despite the entertainment industry’s craven reputation, there are plenty of people in it – not just indie movie types – who long for something pure: complex aesthetic objects that will transport people to new places and new ways of understanding this world and the many alternate realities we’ve crafted for ourselves. That idealism, and the understandable longing for money and attention to achieve that dream, is prominently on display at fests like Tribeca. And yes, a lot of it is about glad-handing and hitting as many cocktail parties as possible (as well as standing next to the right person at the red carpet premieres), but more and more these days, it’s also about figuring out how to make movies do that the networking for you. Filmmakers who’ve managed to crack the social media code have, indeed, mastered the twenty-first century art of networking.

I thought it was terrific that Tribeca devoted an entire day of the Fest to a conference on interactive media. The event was held in Frank Gehry’s gleaming IAC building, in front of an impossibly long wall of screens. The shallow wide room was packed from start to finish with a mix of digerati (I was thrilled to meet Christina Warren the entertainment editor for Mashable) and people who’ve been toiling in the traditional media trenches all their lives. The implicit goal was to figure out how to make sure that filmmakers learn how to adapt to an increasingly interactive media space – something more easily said than done. These days, film projects of all sizes are expected to have some sort of online presence, not only for the purpose of promotion but for something far more ephemeral: audience engagement. There are generally no accepted standards to measure the latter, but it usually means that you’ve managed to convince passive potential audience members to take an active role in promoting, extending, or even reimagining the film itself or its subject.

For all too many filmmakers, a transmedia campaign includes a basic formula: a Web site, a Twitter feed, a Facebook page and the coup de grace, an iPhone app. Much to the consternation of app developers like Michelle Byrd from Games for Change, creatives working in traditional media industries often assume that audience engagement just happens on these platforms: as long as you build it, someone will come. But take a quick look at all the apps you’ve installed and don’t use on your phone, and you’ll recognize that even scoring an install doesn’t necessarily lead to one iota of “engagement.”

Learning how to port linear, narrative art forms over to interactive platforms is a tremendous creative and technical challenge. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out Joe Sabia’s video summary of our report on how primetime TV dramas depict the War on Drugs

Ever wonder what it would be like to parachute down to earth, turn on a TV, and learn about the aliens who live here? Well if someone did such a thing, and they tuned into the most popular primetime shows in America (many of which are viewed by billions of people around the world) they would see a lot of story lines about the War on Drugs. And they would probably come to the conclusion that it’s not working.

In other words, they would probably agree with the majority of Americans: in a rare sign of unity across party lines, 63% of Democrats, 64% of Republicans and 70% of Independents describe the War on Drugs as a failure.

This issue came to international attention last weekend at the Summit of Americas, where both current and former presidents across Latin America demanded changes in America’s conduct of the 40-year-old war that has caused decades of chaos across the continent.

On the eve of 4/20 – long associated with cannibis culture and the growing movement to legalize marjuana – the Norman Lear Center released Joe Sabia’s video summary of our research on how the War on Drugs is depicted in primetime. Major findings included:

• In TV storylines about the War on Drugs, drug users are not arrested and drug suspects are often portrayed as morally ambiguous or even heroic.
• In these TV shows, 65% of drug suspects are white, accurately reflecting that the vast majority of drug users (and likely offenders) in the U.S. are white.
• Despite the predominance of African-Americans and other minorities in U.S. prisons for drug violations, most drug manufacturers and dealers in the series studied were white.
• Prescription drug abuse and methamphetamines were depicted three times more often than recreational marijuana.

Narrating Behavior Change

It was exhilarating to participate in a five-day workshop in Mexico City hosted by the World Bank. Researchers, media makers and development experts from 15 countries shared knowledge about entertainment education techniques and worked together to develop new behavior change campaigns across Africa and South America. Find out more.

Fashion & Politics

Does fashion play a role in politics? You betcha! But all the fashion rules are turned on their head in a world where having a signature style can make you a target for derision. I had a lot of fun talking to Esquire about who's deviated from the uniform (e.g., Bernie) and why.
Find out more.

ONA LONDON

I'll be crossing the pond to attend the Online News Association's conference in London, March 6, 2015. The focus is on mobile and so I'll be presenting the Media Impact Project's latest how-to guide on Mobile Metrics. Find out more about
the session
.

Social Media in India

A big highlight of my year was a trip to India to speak at
APOGEE, a technical extravaganza including over 6000 students, 100 colleges, and 80 technical events at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani. I was joined by a star-studded crew, including Mansoor Khan, a titan of the Indian Film Industry, and Dr. Walter Lewin, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the MIT. Check out the
video of my talk on the social impact of social media in India, where digital social networking is booming (especially among women). Find out more about the event
here.

Mission Creek Festival

I'm very excited to keynote the Innovation Conference at the Mission Creek Festival, a wonderful music, film, lit and food fest that takes over the entirety of Iowa City. I'll be talking about Technologies of Taste and the impact of recommendation systems. Headliners include great indie bands like Real Estate, Foxygen and the clever Father John Misty, along with literary superstars like Lorrie Moore and that quirky Ander Monson. Join us March 31 - April 5!
Find out more.

Pop Culture & Science

Last Fall, I attended a timely workshop at MIT on
The Evolving Culture of Science Engagement. Sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Culture Kettle, we explored how popular culture helps frame, inform and distort our understanding of science. Read the report.

Real Food Media Contest

I had so much fun juding the Real Food Media Contest last year that I'm doing it again. And I'm thrilled to see that Tom Colicchio, Padma Lakshmi, Jamie Oliver, Michael Pollen, Eric Schlosser, and Alice Waters have signed on as well. We’ll be looking for short films that tell great stories about sustainable food and farming:
Check out the finalists and vote for your favorite..

On The Media

I met Bob Garfield, host of NPR's popular program "On The Media," at a terrific conference hosted by TTI/Vanguard, where both of us gave talks on some big problems in the media industry. Afterward, Bob interviewed me about Netflix's data-driven decision to produce the edgy "Orange is the New Black," and included it in an episode called "Dare to Stream.".

LEAP Symposium @ Art Center

I'm a huge fan of Art Center's Designmatters program and so there was no way I was going to miss their LEAP Symposium, which brought together over 100 national thought-leaders working at the intersection of design and social innovation. With IDEO's Jocelyn Wyatt and frog's Robert Fabricant in the room, it was bound to be great. A report has been published in Design Principles and Practices: just let me know if you want a copy ;-)

Imaging War: The Primetime War on Terror

This year Drexel University will devote its Great Works Symposium to the matter of media -- specifically, how we generate images of war. I'm excited to be giving a lecture on November 5 about my research on how the War on Terror is depicted in the most popular dramas on television. Check out the video and the full report. The findings might surprise you.

Championing Women & Diversity in the Media Business

I was thrilled to join Gail Berman, the first and only female executive to hold the top posts at both a major film studio and television network, and Jacqueline Hernandez, COO of Telemundo, to talk about the importance of diversity in media organizations. This event was co-sponsored by Ms. Magazine and USC Annenberg’s Center on Communication Leadership & Policy. Watch the video.
Find out more.

Women Empowered at Cognizant

I'm flattered to have been invited back again to be the featured speaker at another Women Empowered event sponsored by Cognizant, a global IT services company that is taking gender diversity in the workplace very seriously. I'll be talking about social media and the need to recruit women in technology industries at the Computer History Museum March 4. Joining me in the conversation will be UT Austin's Tricia Berry, Fizziology COO Jen Handley and Cognizant's Ben Pring.
Find out more and register here.

TED Radio Hour

Guy Raz interviewed me about the culture of copying in the fashion industry in what he called “maybe our best show ever.” The show included one of my all-time faves, Steven Johnson, and Mark Ronson, who produced such inspired work with Amy Winehouse (may she rest in peace).
Check it out!.

My TED Talks

TEDxUSC: Lessons From Fashion’s Free Culture

I was extremely proud when TED.com picked up this talk that I delivered at TEDxUSC, the site of the first TEDx in the world. My talk focuses on the fascinating culture of creativity in the fashion industry, where copying is actually legal.

TEDWomen: Social Media & the End of Gender

I was very proud to share the stage with Madeleine Albright, Eve Ensler, Donna Karan, Sheryl Sandberg and a slew of other impressive speakers at the inaugural TEDWomen. My topic here? Social Media & the End of Gender.

TEDxOC: The Politics of Personal Taste

My fifth talk for the TED network is based on one of my favorite research projects at the Norman Lear Center. It was a special pleasure to speak at the stunning Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, California.
Watch the video
.

TEDxPHX: Can Movies Really Change People?

Here's my most recent talk which is about how movies can have a measurable impact on people's knowledge and beliefs.

Follow me on Twitter

Fashion & The Creative Commons of Color

Anyone who knows me will realize immediately that I would not be able to resist an event called "Color Lust." I am thrilled to be the keynote speaker at the 50th anniversary summit of the Color Marketing Group, which, probably unbeknownst to you, plays a role in determining the color of your furniture, your car upholstery, your nail polish . . . you name it. I'll be speaking about fashion and the ownership of color on October 28 in luscious art deco Miami!
Find out more.

TED Ads Worth Spreading

I was very proud to be a part of TED's Ads Worth Spreading challenge - an effort to acknowledge the power of advertising and to encourage those who wield that power to do something good with it. I was teamed up with
Kenzo Digital, a new media wunderkind (and an all around nice guy) to identify ad campaigns that touch a cultural nerve; ads that capture or catalyze a cultural movement, moment or event. You can check out the winners here!

Gastronomy & Technology in Barcelona

It's a techie foodie delight! I'll be delivering the keynote presentation during Gastronomy & Technology Days in Barcelona, October 18. Sponsored by the most famous chef in the world, Ferran Adria, and Telefonica, the biggest telecom company in Spain, this event will bring together people exploring the intersection between new technology and food.

Making Media Now

The Filmmakers Collaborative has asked me to speak about media-fueled impact at the Making Media Now conference at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design on June 8. My panel will discuss how cross-platform media and partnerships with NGOs, government and corporations can create measurable impact."
Find out more.